General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

The guy is a star - here's some one liners

1. "British women can't cook" (in Britain in 1966).

2. "What do you gargle with, pebbles?" (speaking to singer Tom Jones after the 1969 Royal Variety Performance).

3. "I declare this thing open, whatever it is." (on a visit to Canada in 1969).

4. "Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed" (during the 1981 recession).

5. "If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." (at a 1986 World Wildlife Fund meeting).

6. "It looks like a tart's bedroom." (on seeing plans for the Duke and Duchess of York's house at Sunninghill Park in 1988)

7. "Yak, yak, yak; come on get a move on." (shouted from the deck of Britannia in Belize in 1994 to the Queen who was chatting to her hosts on the quayside).

8. "We didn't have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking 'Are you all right? Are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?' You just got on with it." (about the Second World War commenting on modern stress counselling for servicemen in 1995).

9. "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?" (to a driving instructor in Oban, Scotland, during a 1995 walkabout).

13. "Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf." (to young deaf people in Cardiff, in 1999, referring to a school's steel band).

14. "They must be out of their minds." (in the Solomon Islands, in 1982, when he was told that the annual population growth was 5%).

15. "You are a woman, aren't you?"(In Kenya, in 1984, after accepting a small gift from a local woman).

16. "If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed." (to British students in China, during the 1986 state visit).

17. "Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species in the world." (in Thailand, in 1991, after accepting a conservation award).

18. "Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease." (in Australia, in 1992, when asked to stroke a Koala bear).

19. "You can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly." (to a Briton in Budapest, Hungary, in 1993).

20. "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" (to a wealthy islander in the Cayman Islands in 1994).

21. "You managed not to get eaten, then?" (suggesting to a student in 1998 who had been trekking in Papua New Guinea that tribes there were still cannibals).

22. In Germany, in 1997, he welcomed German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at a trade fair as "Reichskanzler" - the last German leader who used the title was Adolf Hitler.

23. "You're too fat to be an astronaut." (to 13-year-old Andrew Adams who told Philip he wanted to go into space. Salford, 2001).

24. "I wish he'd turn the microphone off." (muttered at the Royal Variety Performance as he watched Sir Elton John perform, 2001).

The list goes on ---

I hope he gets well, we'll miss his gags !!!!